The Knot

Impossibility exists within this compressed, twisted and tortured desire to be. Relentlessly harassed and pressured into submission, to find a way, to set new direction away from this relentless beat down of hell rays. Life wasn’t always like this though.

A landscape of stone and gravel, weathered by heat, cold, rain and yet more heat, cold and rain repeated over thousands of years. This action causing fracturing and fissuring of the surface rock, providing shaded nests for life to have its way in the cooling fissures.

Initial life appeared to be simple enough. The sprouting seed, it’s two guiding leaves unfurling and growing from the accumulated fissure debris, stimulated to life by season ending cyclonic rains to soak this ancient and porus landscape once more. It’s roots with desire of vigour diving downwards into this skinny and shaded nest of life relieved to be there just in time to avoid months of unrelenting bake reinforced by cloudless skies.

Early years, this plant drinking in the joy of solid winter rains season after season as if by clockwork, primed to sprout and grow purposefully with Spring and hardened by Summertime to then hibernate through those next months of unrelenting cloudless heat. Autumn clouds roll in again heralding a deep tropical trough of wetness working it’s way south east to make landfall and wake the plant with the energised embrace of rain once more.

Happy times indeed for many years, but as always the future is never certain, never guaranteed to be vigorous, or to grow and mature. It is only expectations and desire of life that drive its existence forward. Dread and fear of existence? This deep insecurity doesn’t exist in bountiful times. Happy tomorrow stretches forever without consequence.

If only that could be the way.

The fruitful years of innocent plenty reduce. Those autumn wakening humidity laden rains diminish, the winter cold fronts never quite make it this far into the north of the south. In between this place becomes with many years of a right to life now under question and being seriously challenged. Meagre the life support becomes and leaves shrivel, new buds not forming properly, the leaf unfurling crooked or not at all and branches progressing life by millimetres when in the good times it was centimetres and more.

Sun the great life giver is now the soul of life destroyer. Relentless in the daylight sucking any vestige of moisture out of the fissures, leaves, bark and anything else it touches, to bleach and bring unrelenting suffering is it’s only way.

Chaos in the frantic twining of the stems to get respite, to find the embrace of cool, desperately seeking the space of the tiniest measure of humidity. They twine and then wrap some more, becoming locked in an overlaying dying lovers embrace.

Now? The rains never came and this embrace stays forever never to unfurl or stretch and never to grow old with generational weariness.

Life gone, this wood dehydrates, pales and peels, the wind and too late rains erode the fibres with the locked lovers embrace becoming fragile aged paper mache, turning to fragments and powder while disappearing back to the embrace of mother earth.

Overtime, wind and too late rain blow and wash this ghost of life decay down into a rock fissure, to lay there with death patience gaining moisture in this cool below waiting for its optimistic moment to nurture the soul of a seed back into the cycle of life once more.